About SAM

Scientist Association at McMaster (SAM) originally started with a small group
of enthusiastic graduate students from the the Faculty of Science that came
together to address the concerns and interest of graduate students from the
Faculty of Science.

History of SAM

August 2014

Two graduate students (Mai Yamamoto [Chemical Biology; Science FRC] and Ayush
Ranawade [Biology; Science FRC]) reached out to graduate students in each
department and program under the Faculty of Science to identify issues,
interests and challenges that are commonly faced by Science graduate students
at McMaster. Enthusiastic volunteers below successfully organized events for
ALL Science graduate students in the Fall 2014 and Winter 2015.
During the 2015 Winter semester we also started working towards improving
graduate TA experience for Science graduate students.

June 2015- August 2015

During this period we made the decision to form a graduate association for the
Faculty of Science in order for more flexibility in activities and better
opportunity for funding to support our initiatives. During this period,Charles
Burke, Mai Yamamoto and Tyler Meadows held weekly meetings to set out the
direction and create formal documents for the association. Later, Tarushika
Vasanthan (Biology) and Joshua Nederveen (Kinesiology) joined this initiative,
followed by Kay Fan (Computational Science & Engineering) who created the
website for SAM.

September 2015 - Formal recognition and moving forward

After our successful welcome event from the “Lab Coat Social,” Shawn Hercules
(Biology), Isabel Gaudreau (Maths & Stats) and Michael Lim (Biology) joined
SAM. On September 29th SAM was formally recognized as the Faculty of Science
graduate student association by the Graduate Student Association (GSA)! Since
then, SAM has been actively engaging with other scientists on campus through
social events, workshops and various projects supported by the School of
Graduate Studies, Dean and Associate Dean of Science. SAM has also been keen on
collaborating with other on-campus organizations such as Engineering Graduate
Society (EGS), CUPE 3906, GSA, McMaster Institute of Innovation & Excellence in
Teaching & Learning (MIIETL) as well as industrial partners.